Call for presentations (CFP)

ML is a family of programming languages that includes Standard ML,
OCaml, F#, CakeML, SML#, Manticore, MetaOCaml, JoCaml, Alice ML,
Dependent ML, Flow Caml, and many others. All ML languages share
several fundamental traits, besides a good deal of syntax. They are
higher-order, strict, mostly pure, and typed, with algebraic and other
data types. Their type systems are derived from Hindley-Milner. The
development of these languages has inspired a significant body of
computer science research and influenced the design of many other
programming languages, including Haskell, Rust, and Scala.

ML workshops have been held in affiliation with ICFP continuously
since 2005. This workshop specifically aims to recognise the entire
extended ML family and to provide a forum for presenting and
discussing common issues, both practical (compilation techniques,
implementations of concurrency and parallelism, programming for the
Web) and theoretical (fancy types, module systems,
metaprogramming). The scope of the workshop includes all aspects of
the design, semantics, theory, application, implementation, and
teaching of the members of the ML family. We also encourage
presentations from related languages (such as ATS, Eff, F*, Koka,
Links, Rust, Scala, Swift, etc.), to exchange experience of further
developing ML ideas.

We expect research presentations of original and novel work, but
emphasize that rigorous descriptions do not prevent preliminary or
surprising work: we hope to encourage exciting (if unpolished)
research and deliver a lively workshop atmosphere.

The ML family workshop will be held in close coordination with the
OCaml Users and Developers Workshop.

If you have any question about the workshop, submission or
participation, feel free to send them by email to the program chair,
Gabriel Scherer gabriel.scherer@gmail.com.

Important dates

Format

The ML 2018 workshop will continue the informal approach followed
since 2010. Presentations are selected by the program committee from
submitted abstracts. There are no published proceedings, so
contributions may be submitted for publication elsewhere.

Each presentation should take 20-25 minutes, except demos, which
should take 10-15 minutes. The exact time will be decided based on the
number of accepted submissions. The presentations will likely be
recorded.

Program committee

Zena Ariola, University of Oregon, US

Jacques Garrigue, Nagoya University, Japan

Troels Henriksen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Andrew Kennedy, Facebook, UK

Felix Klock, Mozilla, Germany

Ramana Kumar, DeepMind, UK

Guido Martinez, CIFASIS-CONICET, Argentina

Heather Miller, Northeastern University, US and EPFL, Switzerland

Gabriel Scherer, INRIA Saclay, France

Filip Sieczkowski, Wrocław University, Poland

Antonis Stampoulis, Originate Inc., US

Scope

We seek research presentations on topics including (but not limited
to):

Four kinds of submissions will be accepted: Research Presentations,
Experience Reports, Demos, and Informed Positions.

Research Presentations

Research presentations should describe new
ideas, experimental results, or significant advances in ML-related
projects. We especially encourage presentations that describe work
in progress, that outline a future research agenda, or that
encourage lively discussion. These presentations should be
structured in a way which can be, at least in part, of interest to
(advanced) users.

Experience Reports

Users are invited to submit Experience Reports
about their use of ML and related languages. These presentations
do not need to contain original research but they should tell an
interesting story to researchers or other advanced users, such as
an innovative or unexpected use of advanced features or a
description of the challenges they are facing or attempting to
solve.

Demos

Live demonstrations or short tutorials should show new
developments, interesting prototypes, or work in progress, in the
form of tools, libraries, or applications built on or related to
ML and related languages. (You will need to provide all the
hardware and software required for your demo; the workshop
organisers are only able to provide a projector.)

Informed Positions

A justified argument for or against a language
feature. The argument must be substantiated, either theoretically
(e.g. by a demonstration of (un)soundness, an inference algorithm,
a complexity analysis), empirically or by substantial
experience. Personal experience is accepted as justification so
long as it is extensive and illustrated with concrete examples.

Post-proceedings

ML 2018 is an informal workshop without proceedings. We are planning
to publish a post-proceedings and to invite interested authors of
selected presentations to expand their abstracts for inclusion.

Coordination with the OCaml Users and Developers Workshop

The OCaml workshop is seen as more practical and is dedicated in
significant part to OCaml community building and the development of
the OCaml system. In contrast, the ML family workshop is not focused
on any language in particular, is more research-oriented, and deals
with general issues of ML-style programming and type systems. Yet
there is an overlap, which we are keen to explore in various ways. The
authors who feel their submission fits both workshops are encouraged
to mention it at submission time or contact the program chairs.

Submission details

Submissions should be between one and three pages long, in PDF format,
and printable on US Letter or A4 sized paper. A submission should have
a short abstract and a body between 0 and 3 pages, in one- or
two-column layout. The abstract should be suitable for inclusion in
the workshop program. The bibliography will not be counted against
the page limit. Appendices may be provided, but reviewers will only
look at them if they are curious to; similarly, links to an extended
presentation of the submitted work may be provided.

Finally, please be aware that the submissions may be made public -- in
particular, accepted submissions may be made public on the conference
website. Do not include confidential information in the submitted PDF.